Discovery

Showcase your collection and put information in the hands of your users

CONTENT—Provide materials from the world’s leading libraries and publishers

ACCESS—Make your library available, 24/7 through multiple devices

VISIBILITY—Be where your users are

The Future of FirstSearch

WorldCat® Discovery Services is a new suite of cloud-based applications that brings the FirstSearch® and WorldCat® Local services together. The new suite enables people to discover more than 1.8 billion electronic, digital and physical resources in libraries around the world through a single search of both WorldCat® and a central index that represents more than 2,000 e-content collections. This will make it possible for 18,000+ FirstSearch libraries to offer a richer discovery experience.

Finding information online can seem easy when there’s a single, simple search box. But there’s a lot more than meets the eye to finding exactly the resource you needed, without knowing exactly what it was until you found it. It’s that moment of finding the information you need in one of the world’s libraries that inspires OCLC discovery services.

OCLC’s discovery services build on the foundation of WorldCat to make sure that information seekers find the library materials available—from their own institutions and from other libraries worldwide. Users have long indicated that it is the content that matters, regardless of format or source.

No matter where users begin their search online, the global Web visibility provided by WorldCat.org and through syndication with online commercial partners such as Google, EasyBib and others mean that millions of users include your library in their search—even when they didn’t start their search on a library website originally. By enabling discovery of the collective collection of libraries online, your library is available when and where your users are. Automatically. Seamlessly. Effortlessly.

And WorldCat Local is the Webscale discovery tool that provides your users access to all of your library’s purchased and licensed formats: electronic, digital and physical, presented in a single, simple view.

Our services operate on a global scale but touch local lives, like the QuestionPoint virtual reference service. The cooperative spirit of librarians helping users and each other—around the world—remains a vivid reminder of our shared dedication to helping users find what they’re looking for, quickly.